A Startup That Turns the Ideas Filling Your Head Into Products Filling Shelves

Crates shelving system, one of the inventor-submitted products manufactured by Quirky. Photo: Quirky

He’s only 25 years old, but Ben Kaufman is already something of a veteran when it comes to the process of designing and manufacturing consumer products. Immediately after he received his high school diploma in 2005, Kaufman launched his first company Mophie, to sell a $40 lanyard, case, and headphone combo for the orignal iPhone Shuffle. Called the Song Sling, Kaufman designed the product himself while still in school. Mophie’s next product idea, a case for the iPod Nano, led to a MacWorld Expo Best of Show Award, $1.5 million in funding from Village Ventures, and a new CEO to replace Kaufman, who didn’t have enough experience according to the VC firm.

Ben Kaufman, Quirky’s CEO. Photo: Ben Kaufman

As the company kept cranking out new products, Kaufman quickly realized he was more passionate about the process of building things than actually selling them. He sold his stake in Mophie, which now makes iPhone cases that boost battery life, and for his next venture Kaufman decided to form a company that would help with all the stuff that he enjoyed and often struggled with. To take little more than an idea and develop it into a product ready for store shelves.

Today, Kaufman runs Quirky, a three-year-old community for inventors that helps them get from that eureka moment, to manufacturing and ultimately sales. Aside from the initial genius idea, Quirky does all the heavy lifting, but in return it takes a chunk of the revenue from the sales of the products it brings to market.

It works like this: You submit your idea to Quirky’s website and pay a $10 fee. Recent submissions include a women’s tote bag with a compartment for an umbrella and spare shoes, and a spoon-thermometer combination that could tell you whether your coffee is scalding hot or just warm enough. The community can contribute to your product submission by researching for prior art, adding revisions to the idea, suggesting a different product name, and advising how much they would pay for the product if they could buy it now.

If an invention gains popularity, and the Quirky team sees the potential, it moves to the “Under Consideration” pool of products. Quirky picks two products per week that it will help get ready for production, a process that can include everything from engineering the product to picking colors and finishes. Quirky pays the manufacturing costs of the product, assuming the risk if your great idea fails. But it’s betting on its extensive product development process to make sure whatever it sells is a hit. If your product makes it into Quirky’s online store or onto a store shelf, you get a minimum return of 42 percent of sales of the product from Quirky’s website and external retailers.

Kaufman’s says his goal with Quirky is to help lone inventors realize their ideas with some help from their peers, minimize the hassles in the manufacturing process, and also wield the leverage that much larger players do. “We’re not hiding the fact that building a product is really hard,” says Kaufman. “But no retailer wants to deal with inventors, and no product company has a crowd-sourced pool of inventive ideas.” His vision has landed Quirky some very deep-pocketed partners. Quirky recently closed $68 million in venture capital funding from venture firms Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Norwest Venture Partners, and RRE Ventures.

The Pivot Power adjustable power strip. Photo: Quirky

Quirky already has several successful products under its belt and relationships with popular retailers including Target, Ace Hardware, The Container Store, and Amazon, among others. There’s Pivot Power, a power strip that pivots and adjusts to fit those large brick-like plugs. In the 15 months it’s been available for sale, Pivot Power has earned its inventor, Jake Zien, more than $300,000, according to Quirky figures.

For Zien, Quirky was the best option to turn his idea for an adjustable power strip into a real product. At 17, Zien spoke with an intellectual property attorney about his idea. “His recommendation to me was to first secure a patent, and then to approach manufacturers of other power strips and attempt to sell them the intellectual property,” Zien wrote in an e-mail. “This scenario would have required a huge upfront investment, offered no guarantee that my product would be manufactured, and even if it were, I would have nothing more than an anecdote to prove that it had been my idea.” Several years later, when the attorney told Zien about Quirky, Zien decided it was the best option for his invention.

Another Quirky success story is the Crate interlocking storage system (pictured at top), the first Quirky product made completely in the United States. Crates fits into one of Quirky’s sub-goals to encourage American manufacturing, says Kaufman.

Kaufman says the company’s mission is to make inventing accessible to anyone. With the funding, Quirky will look for new communities to tap into for inventions. “There are smart communities of food bloggers, moms, fitness experts, and other pockets of creative people all over the world,” says Kaufman. “We intend to give those groups their own invention machine.”